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Shielding Domain Registration Info?
occamboy asks: "I'd like to register a new domain, but I'm tired of getting tons of spam (most filtered, but some not) and snail mail whenever I register a new domain. In short, I'd like the domain, but I don't want to announce the details of its owner to the world. I was thinking of using GoDaddy's domain proxy, but the terms are scary: they reserve the right to change the agreement anytime, by posting the new terms on their site, and the buyer automatically agrees to the new terms. What's to prevent them from grabbing my domain name from me, or doing some other nefarious thing? So, is there any good way to anonymously acquire a domain? Should I just register with fake info, use a service ... or what?"
But use a real email address (in case you lose your password and such). This will at least cut down on the junk paper mail. Hope this helps!
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I use a PO Box and an email account I can throw away if things get too bad. I think I might try the 'protected' option next time as the price isn't too bad.
Currently I use domain's by proxy via godaddy for my domain names. Yeah the terms are scary and I have also started looking for some place else to go. I got a letter in the mail (actual paper) from another domain company asking me if I want to switch. I personally do not like the idea of people seeing my info and being able to spam me to high heaven on the listed email address.
Honestly if your just a normal site with nothing illegal on it I do not see the need for other peopel to see your personal information.
As for using fake information... I think that the US government is cracking down on this and is passing laws to really kick you in the butt for using false information. Currently this is a lose lose situation.
All a domain registry company needs to be sucessful is to have all information listed for the WHOIS as anonymous and only release it with a court order. Which would have to be hand delivered by an officer of the law. That is just my opinion, I could be wrong.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
It will still get harvested... but you'll probably only have to cycle it a couple of times a year. The three or four spams a year that'll get through is probably negligible.
This is a good strategy for /. email, too.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
That is the best way to go....real email address with a PO or a fake the address.
Form a company to own the domain, and register it in the name of that company. That way if someone really needs to find you they can, but it will take some work (they'll have to find where you incorporated and then find your name in that paperwork). That should keep the spammers away -- they hate real work.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
For GoDaddy changing the terms materially, drastically to steal from/rip off customers would result in commercial suicide. As an online business the one thing they have going for them is the trust of their users and their reputation. They loose this and they loose business, they have a lot of business so the short term gains wouldn't match the long term losses.
namecheap.com
$8.88 USD domain registry, and like 5$ a year for a 'whoisguard' subscription per domain per year..nobody is getting your info without subpoena
I use them for all of my domains, and couldnt imagine using anyone else..
Also.. you should be wary of godaddy.. i've heard of them snatching up peoples domain for no good reason..
Sometimes people really do need to contact you. If your domain is causing problems or otherwise interfering with the network, or someone has a dispute with you but would rather not let it escalate to the point of sending nastygrams to the owner of your IP block, it is very convienient to be able to just e-mail someone. That's why it is there. Sending a message out to the larger hosting / access company usually results in absolutely nothing, especially if it is a large hosting company.
Stay a part of the community. Keep your contact information available and up-to-date.
The ______ Agenda
Do you know a good domain registrar? The first step is to find a good registrar. The second step is to solve the domain registration info problem.
My experience with GoDaddy is that the company is very abusive. GoDaddy is always trying to sell something else; there are such a huge number of ads that it interferes with proper operation of their web site. Many of the ads seem to me to try to take advantage of people who don't know much about the Internet.
The GoDaddy web site is, in my opinion, amateurish. There are issues like having a password field with 13 spaces, but actually accepting only 11 characters for a password. (I don't know if they have fixed that since I mentioned it to them.)
It's simply outrageous that a company says they can change the terms of a contract with you without your permission, or even knowing. Legally, that cannot be a contract. A contract only exists if you agree to the terms. You cannot enter into a contract that is so broad that you agree to be bound by any terms in the future.
It's amazing how abusive companies are becoming. They seem to be trying to see who can be the most abusive. Have a look at an Ed Foster column that says that the problem is less in Europe: Anti-Sneakwrap Law is UnAmerican.
I knew a three-year-old who once told me: 1) I can do anything I want. 2) You have no control. This is understandable in a three-year-old, who is merely testing the limits. I don't accept it coming from anyone who is older.
Things are really bad in the U.S. now, it seems. Everything to help powerful people get richer. Nothing to take care of the average person.
--
Bush: Spending money the U.S. doesn't have to try to make his administration look good.
You said that you were worry about proxies -- I have secondhand that GANDI is a good registrar -- prices slightly higer than GoDaddy, but significantly better (as in favoring the user versus the registrar) policies. Not sure if they provide a proxy service.
May we never see th
Be careful using domains by proxy. All someone has to do is email or send a letter to them saying you are violating their copyrights and with or without any proof at all they will release your personal information, remove the proxy service from your domain and charge you a $20 administrative fee.
I run a website that lists mp3 song album and song names and I have had this happen to me several times sofar. Be careful.
-Gerard
Why doesn't icann just make a top level domain with the name of .spam. And any body doing spam be required to use it and if not, block their sending domain on the DNS servers and then, the filtering will be easy for anyone who doesn't want to have spam. Just block dotspam.
.spam for those who like ms. or linux.spam for those who like penguins etc, etc.
Spammers can offer mail accounts on spam channels so those who want spam can get spam accounts on different spam channels. Remember there are those who have eaten spam and liked it. Personally I know of no one who has had this experience but such a person might exist.
We could have car.spam for those who like cars.spam or microsoft
It seems so simple has anyone suggested this already.
This is a test!
If a company does something bad, I strongly suggest reporting it to the Better Business Bureau.
As for GoDaddy.com, I currently use them. I also use DomainsByProxy.com. I currently trust both of them. If one of them were to do something to me, and they fail to resolve it, I would contact the BBB. In addition to contacting the BBB, I'd spread word of mouth (over the Net) of what they've done to me.
If you're serious, you should talk to a lawyer. He should know the proper, and legal, ways to register the domain so that the contact info points to your legal representative, not your personal info.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
I like registerfly they are cheap ($9.99/yr) for a domain name and an extra 99cents/yr to have them hide your whois info. They even throw in 25MB of webspace, offer framed forwarding (no ad banners like register.com), and a bunch of other free services. Once I switched to them, I never looked back. :-)
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
I use MyDomain.com for my domain registrations, 8.50 a year and I get very little junk mail or spam. If you are that worried though, get a free email account and a PO Box, the 25$ a year for the box will be well worth it.
For email, I setup a email address that only receives mail from the registrar. All other email is bounced.
For my phone, I'm on the national do not all list. That's an $11,000 fine if someone calls me to sell me something.
My home/business addresses are not really a problem. The only crap mail I get is from Domain Registry of America. I use junk mail to start my fires when it gets cold. The amount of junk mail I get makes it real easy to start the fire on the first try.
The above is not worth reading.
Use a real email address at your domain. Since you control it - set it to filter keep only mail from GoDaddy and your hosting company, since your email from those companies will be coming from known sources.
Use a second account as your personal email, but don't publish that address and make it something slightly off-kilter so spammers have a harder time guessing it.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
myMaskedDomain.com/sublevel/page.html
what happens is goDaddy's asinine servers resolve this as
Godaddy.com/sublevel/page.html
which, since there is no sublevel on the godaddy server. so it breaks. you can only forward a specific page on the top level of your domain. no one can link to it.
next the way they do masked forwarding is simmilar to how most people do it, with an embedded frame html. However their HTML is faulty. for reasons I have not determined most macintosh browsers dont quite handle it right. Specifically if someone tries to print your page what comes out is different then what you see on screen. Its related to the way the frame is being displayed but its not obvious why this happens. But its a fact.
Only recently has the go-daddy webpage itself started working well with Safari. up until recently to edit your setting you had to pull up internet explorer to be able to view the web page features.
Finally their customer service is among the worst I have ever experienced. You never get any resolution and the people must be retarded since they always seem to send you out a boiler plate response taken from their FAQ to a different question than the one you asked. You cant get them on the phone. and you never get a resolution to your problem.
Contrast this to NameZero.com which cost twice as much as goDaddy but you get personal replys promptly from experts, usually the same person, till your problem is resolved. After the go-daddy experience, paying $10 more per year not to waste my time wasa relief. the tech support explanations are clear and they are able to speak in expert terms for experts and simple terms for newbies. the masked domain forwarding works for all subdirectories on your host and the frame html renders correctly on all browsers I have tried.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
So you get the PO box, for one reason - as far as the untrained eye without a legal proceeding is concerned, your computer with your domain is actually housed inside of a box that, at its smallest, is the size of a one foot thick index card. They need legal documentation to get your real address, and you in turn need to prove to the USPS where you really live.
The email address is a little simpler. It's easy enough to set in your /etc/aliases file (or whatever your MTA of choice uses) something like 'hostmaster' or 'hostslave' and have it divert to you, and in turn you just have either Procmail or your MUA of choice to stick it in a folder that you might check on once in a while. After a while, remove/change the address, change it in the whois record, and watch as the few spams that come in just kind of bounce.
In short, in my experience it's really not that much that you're going to get in the way of junk mail of any flavor. YMMV.
This sig no verb.
My registrar is Dotster, who has a free spam whois shield available for its customers. The email address in the domain info given out is really an alias to the one you give them, and that alias shifts like once a week or so (not sure on how often). This is generally not often enough to get onto spam lists, though I have gotten a couple of messages over the last few years. Obviously not something to worry about.
I blame one unscrupulous company for most of the problems in this area, and that's the Domain Registry of America scam where they send out misleading "renewal notices" even though they're not the registrar for the domain. Why these people are still allowed to operate is beyond me.
http://www.ev1servers.net
not only do they do dedicated servers, but you can also get domains through them. you have to sumbit real info for payment, but after you purchase the domain, they have no problem with you putting fake info on your domain.
Ooh, or, instead of starting a company to register the domain, you could buy an identity from the Nigerian and establish residency there, including buying a house (which you could keep empty) to function as a drop-box for mail and the like.
That'd be easier than getting, like, a PO box.
-Waldo Jaquith
Their NamePrivacy option (for an extra charge) masks all your details. People can still contact you with certified/priority mail to your listed address on your domain, and the email address listed constantly changes making it difficult to harvest. Check them out http://www.namesecure.com
...in bed
RegisterFly.com has a pretty good service for this (for only a buck extra per year when you register with/transfer to them), and their terms appear to be a lot saner than GoDaddy's.
As an IT manager at a previous employer, I once had to consolidate a bunch of domain names to a single vendor (Verisign terms, at the time, didn't suck as much as they seem to now, so that's where we consolidated). All the other domain hosting services let go of the records once they were notified and had verified the validity of my request.
RegisterFly, on the other hand, fought tooth and nail to hold on to it, and only let go once we got our company attorneys involved. I never understood the reasoning -- we only had 4 months left with them anyway, and we'd paid such a ridiculously low amount to register the name anyway, I"m certain they spent more manpower dollars in fighting the transfer than they ever could have made on the original domain registration fees.
Truly the worst part (then anyway, YMMV now) was that they didn't have a phone contact method -- most everything had to be done via online chat, and INVARIABLY the person "typing" on the other end (loosely stated because of their awful grammar skills) didn't have a clue. Nevertheless, you may have better experiences with them, but you couldn't pay me to put a domain with them now.
I have a number of domains registered with http://domaindiscover.com/ (also known as http://buydomains.com/). They have an excellent control panel, good prices, domain forwarding, URL forwarding, temp pages, parking, frame forwarding, accessible MX records, and last year they introduced the ability to encrpyt your registration email address in the whois database - this single act alone cut my spam by about 70%, and I'm very grateful to them. I have even had reason to speak with the company on one occasion, and dealt with a friendly, knowledgeable and helpful guy within seconds, who answered all my queries.
I'll bet something like vpopmail could do easy unlimited accounts on the fly like that, so that a webhost company wouldn't even need to charge extra for this service.
Use MyPrivacy.ca. They give you a free email address that will forward to your existing address. They only allow email from legit domain hosts to get through unchallenged. If from just anyone, they have to go through a challenge/response system.
Works great, I've yet to get any Spam in the last few years that I've been using them.
http://www.myprivacy.ca/
Clear down the counter every so often at Spam Gourmet or adjust the anti-spam behaviour with a Pobox account.
Or get your ISP do hold the domain on your behalf
Insert
I've got ten domains at Godaddy. All of them have Domains-by-Proxy too. Nothing in particular to hide. It's just none of your damn business. If you want to get me an email, you can do so. But having a net connection doesn't buy you the right to know where I sleep. Darling.
Anyway, I did some fairly thorough looking around for alternatives, based on the last few days of posting in this thread, and here's what I found.
Most of the registrars mentioned here don't cut it, in terms of a blanket WHOIS proxy.
I'm attracted to Gandi on principle, but just hiding my email address is not enough, I'm afraid. Not being able to call them kinda sucks too.
Same for DomainDiscover (on the proxy piece).
I can't find any mention of a proxy at Dotster.
Namesecure says flat out that they won't proxy the name field.
Enom and their resellers are a mixed bag. Enom apparently offers some kind of guardian service at the same prices as Godaddy, but they sure don't make it very obvious what they'll do or won't do. The front page ad says "ID Protect - Only $8.00/yr per domain", but the link underneath it (to their 'Knowledge Base') doesn't lead to any information at all about the service.
The one ray of light among them was Registerfly, also an Enom reseller if I understand correctly. "Protectfly" is advertised well, explained well, and cheap. I'm not transferring, because I'd rather go to the source than to a reseller. But I will consider it for future accounts.
Love to hear back/get corrected/be flamed if anyone's still reading the thread. Peace.